Christmas and Xmas
I noticed an online acquaintance 
the other day becoming extremely agitated that someone had referred to Christmas using the colloquialism Xmas. She felt that this was insulting, and offensive in the extreme. What she didn't realize was that Xmas as a shortened form for Christmas has a venerable, and solidly Christian, history.
The word Christmas is a compound of Christ + mass; we see it first in Old English in the form Cristes mæsse in 1038, according to the OED. The Old English form eventually evolved to the Middle English Christemasse. The word Christ is derived from the Greek word Christos, meaning "anointed," a literal translation of the Hebrew cognate of messiah.
The X of Xmas is a shorthand way to refer to the name of Christ. In Greek, the language of the New Testament, the Greek letter Chi, written as X (and indeed the source of our own English letter X) is the first letter of Christ's name. X has been used as an abbreviation for Christ since at least the early 1500s. Earlier, and closely related abbreviations include Xp and Xr, from the Chi Rho and Iota, the Greek letters that spell the Chr, the first three letters of Christ. In medieval manuscripts and art, the Chi Rho pages are derived from the Chi and the Rho, and sometimes, the Iota or I of Christ. I note that in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, there's an entry that uses the shorthand of Xres masesse for Christmass; an abbreviation like Xmas is not so heretical, after all, and in truth, is quite traditional.
Filed under:
Comments
Christmas and Xmas
The use of shortning the word Christman may be a traditional shortcut, but why do it. Are we so much in a hurry that we can't honor his whole name. Using the shortcut is like putting an X-ing out his name. Holloween has the same amount of letters in it that Christmas has, but when was the last time anyone wrote a shortcut for that on their Holloween supply box?
Oh, please
Christ would have been able to write in Aramaic, and Hebrew--both of which omit vowels, and use abbreviations constantly.
Paul and Luke used abbreviations--including abbreviating the word Christ by using the Chi-Rho and a digraph.
And it's Halloween. With an A, from the word "holy" plus the word for evening; because it's All-Hallows Eve, the night before Alholowmesse--in otherwords, Halloween is an abbreviated form of a Christian holiday (that's holy day) that has been celebrated by Christians since Boniface conscecrated it in 691.
nitpicking
Hey, if we want to start nitpicking about the reality of Jesus's time and place, in addition to being literate in both a living and, at the time, purely liturgical language, he probably wasn't a carpenter, either. Archeological evidence suggests that Nazareth didn't even exist until around 300 AD and that it was only later co-opted by Christian revisionists to make Jesus seem like a simple country boy. Chances are that a politically-savvy fellow like Jesus wouldn't have had a manual, blue-collar job like carpentry, but rather a quasi-middle-class trade in a larger city. So, really, the folks who get uppity about the X-Mas thing have bigger theological problems to worry about than the nuances of pre-English shorthand.
I under stand about the actual abbreviating of the word Christ by using the Chi-Rho and a digraph. But as for me... let me explain why I write the complete word out. When I was about 7 or 8 (I'm 56) this kid who just move down the street from us, who became a friend of mine, did not have nice clothes and things and my remember my parents giving them some things and some of the things were Christmas items ( think it was just before Christmas). Anyway when I went over to visit him I saw the same boxes of Christmas with a large black painted over X crossing out the name Christmas. I asked Jake why that X was there and what did that mean. He told me that his dad doesn't believe there was a Jesus but Christmas was OK. So to this day I do write the complete word out, just my way of showing my honor and respect and that I have enough time in the day to do it and did not feel that to save time use any shortcuts.But hey, if you wamt to do it the other way go ahead. As far not spelling Halloween correctly, just tired. Oh yea, I'm aware of the history of Halloween and it's relationship to churches views on making this celebration less paganish-lol. Also being a carperter long ago was not what we today may think as being such. One was lable that as one of many talents, what we might call someone a Jack Of All Trades or a laborer of sort.